Projects

An Inertia project is a directory on disk. It holds the framework the project targets and the animations you have authored, and it is what the editor opens, saves, and autosaves.

Where projects live

Projects live under InertiaStorage in your home directory:

~/InertiaStorage/
└── MyProject.inertia/
    ├── meta.json
    └── animations/
        └── animation.inertia

Path	Contents
MyProject.inertia/	The project. The name before .inertia is the project title.
meta.json	Project metadata — the target framework and the project title.
animations/animation.inertia	Every animation in the project. This is the file your app bundles.

meta.json is small:

meta.json

{
    "framework": "swiftUI",
    "projectTitle": "MyProject"
}

Both keys are required — the editor fails to open a project whose meta.json is missing either one.

Creating a project

From the start screen, choose New project, give it a title, and the editor creates the directory structure for you. Choosing Open project instead lets you pick an existing .inertia directory.

Opening a project loads its animations into the timeline, with each track's playhead parked at the end of what was recorded, so recording continues after the existing keyframes rather than on top of them.

Getting animations into your app

The editor writes only to its own project directory. Shipping an animation means copying the file into your Xcode project:

cp ~/InertiaStorage/MyProject.inertia/animations/animation.inertia \
   path/to/MyApp/animation.inertia

The file must end up in Copy Bundle Resources for your target, and its name must match the id you passed to InertiaContainer — id: "animation" loads animation.inertia.

Symlink instead of copying

If you get tired of copying, symlink the project's animation file into your Xcode project once:

ln -s ~/InertiaStorage/MyProject.inertia/animations/animation.inertia \
      path/to/MyApp/animation.inertia

Xcode copies through the symlink at build time, so a rebuild picks up whatever the editor last saved. The tradeoff is that your repository no longer records the animation as it shipped — commit the real file before you tag a release.

Version control

animation.inertia is binary, so git will treat it as such and no diff will be readable. What keeps it from churning is that the editor writes the store sorted by id, and keyframe ids are UUIDs generated when the keyframe is recorded and stable across saves — so an unchanged animation re-saves to identical bytes.

To read a change, decode it. Any MessagePack CLI will do; with Python:

python3 -c "import msgpack,sys,json; print(json.dumps(msgpack.unpack(open(sys.argv[1],'rb')), indent=2))" \
    animations/animation.inertia

The project directory is worth committing alongside your app if the animations are part of the product.